we have a remedy! we have!

our economy's cries can be heard all around the world--even in the condé nast building, which is usually a fortress invulnerable to such woes, safeguarded by all manner of magic enchantments against the plight of the common, un-prada-clad citizen. but no more! apparently, when the financial sector screws itself, tragedy ensues for advance publications:

Condé Nast Publications named a new publisher for The New Yorker on Thursday and put the magazine’s previous publisher in charge of Internet ad sales for the entire company. The move is part of a continuing reorganization as the company grapples with the magazine industry’s plunging ad revenue. . . .

Lisa Hughes, The New Yorker’s new vice president and publisher . . . takes over a magazine clearly in need of help. The New Yorker’s ad pages dropped 26.8 percent in 2008, far more than other Condé Nast titles, and more than double the industrywide decline of 11.7 percent. Financial services ads, a New Yorker mainstay, were among the hardest-hit categories last year.

The New Yorker was operating in the black in early 2008, but not by the end of the year, according to company executives who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss finances.

welcome, lisa hughes! may you do my favorite weekly proud. and as a concerned citizen and devoted reader of your foundering publication, i would very much like to do my part to assist in the rescue effort. in that spirit, a suggestion:

FIRE SASHA FRERE-JONES. HE IS A SUCKING WOUND IN THE ABDOMEN OF THE NEW YORKER AND A KNIFE IN THE EYE OF ANY AND ALL SELF-RESPECTING MUSIC ENTHUSIASTS.

come on, lisa. come on. you know it's true. how can anyone who trash-talks pavement for their lyrical obscurity, and indie music in general for its disinterest in prominent rhythm and musical tradition, one week and then raves about animal collective for their penchant for chaos and near-total absence of linguistic sense, rhythm, or melody the next ever expect to be taken seriously? did he think we wouldn't notice? well, here's what i think: every once in a while when sasha tries to skeev on some sweet young thing at webster hall, said thing gives him a once-over, rolls its eyes, and says, "whatevs, old man." this causes a knee-jerk wholesale rejection of youth and indie culture for being ridiculous and inscrutable, followed by a renewed effort to convince said culture that he is still in the game. but it's all crap. CRAP. and we know it's crap—that's right, we're on to you, you fraud!—because he is at least a year behind the curve on profiling anyone of interest. by march of 2008 everyone in america knew who amy winehouse was and what kind of shape her liver was in. no, there was not anything surprising about her being awarded five grammys; nor was there anything surprising in sasha's profile of her, which he very gamely admitted came out about a billion years after her album exploded and her notoriety became fodder for leno and letterman. what would be surprising is if he ever, EVER reviewed ANY album or act before it was old hat, or said anything in that review that wasn't an uninspired, slightly snootier regurgitation of things that were already generally known, even by me, when i am so far from hip that i still rhapsodize about the golden era of radio (i.e., 1991–1997) and occasionally wake up craving counting crows' recovering the satellites. even i can tell, sasha, that everyone at the new yorker ought to be telling you to piss up a rope. i would draw on some of your more recent articles for evidence, but i more or less gave up reading them some time ago. i bet i'm not alone.

that's approximately two pages of every issue, lisa, that you are practically throwing away. two whole pages. with a circulation of between one and two million, i mean, that really adds up. and it's not like he's going to change. the pattern is proven. you have to cut him loose. you just have to. really, it isn't about me; it's about the new yorker. it is an eighty-four-year-old institution, and i know you don't want it failing on your watch. it survived the depression, for christ's sake.

just, do the right thing, lisa. we're all counting on you now. it's in your hands.




p.s. while you are doing right things, perhaps you should take this opportunity to reconsider nancy franklin's tenure. it could be that i don't watch enough television, but i'm pretty sure it's that she's unbearable.

oh, in that case . . .

everyone could deal with melting ice caps, right? coastal erosion, elevations in dangerous weather patterns, species extinction--no sweat. no sweat. but no one told us that a side effect of global warming might be increased humidity! finally, though, the hideous truth that no one dared speak has come out. all of those hot gusts circulating in those expansive storm fronts and causing all that ice to melt and flood our beachfronts and waterways might actually lead to there being more moisture in the air. well, fuck. that's a whole other pack of tomatoes. i guess we'd all better buy bigger, more powerful air conditioners.

according to nathan gillett of the university of east anglia, humidity is "an important contribution to heat stress in humans." i'm not a climatologist or an epidemiologist or anything, but i'm going to tentatively concur with this statement. it is certainly a source of stress to me, particularly when it leads to the first thing out of every other human's mouth being,"god, it's so humid!" it has been my experience that humidity tends to increase in tandem with heat, as does human stress, and i'm made slightly more confident in my assessment by the fact that "the finding isn't surprising to climate scientists."

i find the whole bit almost seussian: humans' refusal to actually live in the climate has been one of the primary factors contributing to strongly negative shifts in that climate, which have led to an even more staunch refusal to accept the climate, thus worsening the climate, and wheeeeeee! around and around we go, until we land here in this ridiculous place where this perfectly plain pattern is revealed to us as shocking news. and it is still being presented as if nothing were at stake but the cleanliness of our armpits:

although it might not be a lethal kind of thing, it's going to increase human discomfort.

poor us. couldn't i just cry us a river. i would sweat us one, if any building in the world ever set its thermostat above 50 degrees. it is still pretty warm here in new york; i haven't even noticed any leaves starting to turn. i guess i'll have to wait until it gets cooler outside, when the buildings turn their thermostats up to 75 and i have to take my coat and sweater off the instant i pass through the door in order to keep from fainting from heat stroke. tomorrow we sweat; today, we weep.

losing my appetite

september 14 was a big red letter day for one miss juniper pearl, ladies and gentleman. on that day, she woke up rather late, made herself some coffee, and sat down in her living room to read a chapter or two of some book or other before she got to work proofreading the copyedited chapters of some manuscript or other that was on its way to being a book. and that was that.

perhaps you are wondering which of the above letters struck her as so big and red, as they all look rather small and standard here on the page. but it's a trick, you see; the big red letters are not up there. there is a small sign pointing in their direction, and my most loyal and observant readers may have noted it, but then again they may not have, so let me help: miss pearl took her coffee and sat down to read a book.

do you see? DO YOU SEE????? a book! she read a book! it's been months and months, so many endless and interminable months, since she even considered reading a book! but she was able to do it that day, my friends, because

she did not have an unread issue of the new yorker in her possession.


woohooooo!!!!! woooooo!!!!!!!! hooray!!!!!!!! and let me tell you, folks, it was a good thing. see, the issue she had finished the day before was the september 3 food issue, and some of the articles in the food issue were about as tasteful and tantalizing as nineteen-day-old beef lo mein, slick with heavy lubricants and and packed with colorful but bland and oversteamed vegetables, all of it laminating the tongue and throat with its swampy bilge, leaving the eater quite certain that he or she is going to deeply regret having eaten it in an hour or two . . .

well, it was a much needed break. and no one is sadder about that than miss pearl, because she hasn't needed or wanted a break from the new yorker since 1995. she is so sad about it, in fact, that she is having some trouble accepting it and has been driven to speak about the incident in the third person. but she's coming to terms with it, and i think that maybe taking a moment to discuss some of her grievances will help everyone move on. so.

nauseator #1: calvin trillin on the street food of singapore. there would have been nothing wrong with this article if calvin had happened to be in singapore and decided, while he was there, to sample some of the local vendors' fare. in fact, that would have been a delightful article. i like asian food, i like street vendors, i like things on sticks, and i am passionate about noodles. i'm also fond of calvin overall. what i do not like so much is the idea of anyone, anyone, in this age of rampant pollution, impending fuel shortages, and the vast and relentless publicity surrounding both of those concerns (some of it spewing forth from the new yorker itself, hype whore that it is these days), hopping on a jet and flying to the other side of the planet for the sole purpose of sampling the local vendors' fare. the thought of it makes me crazy in all kinds of ways. of course the blind self-absorption of the act hurts my heart, but i think trillin's choice to write a gleeful six-page article about the act as though it were worthy of global notice and commendation hurts it more, and the new yorker's decision to run that article positively breaks it, since it means they have decided that they are catering to a readership that wants that kind of article. now, by "that kind of article" i don't mean food writing; lots of people love that, and i am often one of them. but while reading this article, one gets the feeling that trillin thinks he is a crazy, crazy rebel, eating food on the street while standing up like some kind of rough-knuckled, down-to-earth anydude, even though we all know that a round-trip business-class flight from new york to singapore costs somewhere around $7,000 and the quantity and variety of food he crammed into his oblivious, bottomless gullet while in singapore could easily have rung in at something similar. he may have said some intriguing things about singaporean cuisine, but the premise of the article was so ludicrous that i could just barely hear them. does anyone really go on vacation to eat? in all of singapore, there was nothing that trillin wanted to see more than the country's food courts? and he's planning his return trip before he's even landed back in the u.s., that's how natural all of it seems to him. well, it seems grotesque to me, and i am tempted to start up a "keep trillin fat in nyc" fund and buy the man some cooking lessons, so he can learn how to make char kway teow in his own home. i might love to read about his successes and follies in the kitchen. it isn't his style that's jogging all those greasy burps loose from the murky depths of my roiling bowels.

swerve from this to judith thurman, who chose to spend her vacation eating nothing at all. this is an endeavor that could, potentially, have some merit; alas, "could" is as close as we come. all promise is negated by her choice to (a) fast in an elite spa; (b) fast for only three days; and (c) attempt to draw correlates between this experience and the highly significant, often world-changing hunger strikes of various historical and religious figures, including gandhi. she speaks with great authority about the giddiness and energy some long-term fasters, including anorexics, can experience after many days without food—something i question her right to do, since "many" in this case means many more than she spent sipping juice in the swank california courtyard of We Care. i don't know who she thinks she is to lecture anyone about ramadan or christ's forty days in the desert, but after reading her piece i do have a new understanding of and empathy for job, who "got too depressed to eat." if anyone is interested in a writerly account of a non-"ultra-lush" fast, i recommend david rakoff's in don't get too comfortable, which describes a twenty-day diet of strange and intricate teas that the writer brews up in his own apartment. no facials, no core radiance breathwork practitioners, no yearning to achieve more highs by struggling through three more days of nectar-fueled pampering and therapeutic colonics in an isolated, high-end resort; just one hungry writer explaining that sometimes the things we think will build character by teaching us to endure suffering do build character, but in a completely different way—by showing us how dumb it was to think that what we were enduring was the kind of suffering that builds character. i think there is a very good chance that darling judith has not read this book.

but the star of the show, the mystery container on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator that has been leaking something sinister and cloudy and freckled with small mobile clots for the past three weeks, is adam gopnik, for his hopelessly and infuriatingly backwards foray into local eating. i have loved adam, i have, for many many moons, i have loved him with an everlasting love—but no more and never again. he has proven himself an insincere jumper of other people's trains, the very worst kind of ersatz environmentalist: the narrow-thinking, narrow-acting self-congratulator. and now he is my enemy. what a crying shame.

the idea of eating locally is a fine one, and the idea of defining acceptably local food as that grown within the confines of the five boroughs of new york city is about as extremist as local eating can get—even if you are only doing it for a week, as gopnik was. but the generally accepted point of local eating, as gopnik explains, is to "encourage sustainable agriculture by eating things . . . that don't have to be shipped halfway around the world, guzzling fossil fuel, to get to your table." gopnik claims to have been motivated at least in part by a desire to further the movement, to prove that city folk can hug trees, too. but how does he go about obtaining this local food, in a city with one of the most extensive and accessible public transportation systems in the world? why, he gets in his car, of course.

from somewhere on the upper east side, gopnik travels to the decker farm in staten island, reachable by subway and bus but only "fifteen minutes across the verrazano-narrows bridge." he heads to the red hook community farm in brooklyn, nine miles away and easy to get to by subway if you aren't afraid to walk a few blocks, which i can't imagine any long-time new yorker being. but he and his kids and his greenmarket-guru guide tool on over and back in their own car. he drives to the bronx—a distance of five miles, a little less than the distance i commute to work every morning—to try to bully some kindhearted man into slaughtering one of the beloved egg chickens he has been raising in a carefully and determinedly maintained city coop. and at the end of all this he has the balls to refer to his toe-dip in the pool of conscientious living as "M.T.A. localism," even though he mentions having made use of the m.t.a. over the course of his week-long experiment exactly once. you do not get to make up for the food miles you have spared by buying locally, adam gopnik, that is not how the plan works, and if this flirtation with the hip new shade of green were more than a fleeting whim for you, you would have realized that. at the very least, you might have felt compelled to leave the references to your car out of the article. but you didn't mean it, did you? it was just something to write a story about. one week, to prove that it could be done, even by someone like you, and then everything could go back to normal. because "normal" has, obviously, been really great for everything so far.

he got his chicken, you know; not from that decent man who read him the riot act outside of the bronx's garden of happiness but from a different place (also in the bronx, between ten and fifteen blocks from the garden, and which he also drove to) that seems to have suited him better, where someone was happy to butcher and bag a chicken that had been "born elsewhere, arrived in hope, lived in cramped quarters, ended its New York existence violently and unexpectedly at the hands of someone with a fatal amount of money." of course, it isn't the money that's fatal, is it? it's the mindset; it's the choice of the person with the money to use it to do whatever makes him or her happy, the rest of the world and all that's living in it be damned. some of these people have children who seem like spoiled brats, by the way, and i'm fairly certain that isn't a coincidence. when your parents can't understand that local eating is a tiny corner of the vast landscape of environmental action, not a trendy new ribbon to pin to their suit jacket, of course you're going to wind up guzzling snapple on your central park safari. did he not bring his kids along in an attempt to teach them something? did he simply think his story required a cynical foil for his own pureness of heart? the trek through the urban pasture with wildman steve brill is something that was also done by david rakoff and recounted in don't get too comfortable. i think it is wholly possible that gopnik has read the book, but i'm not sure he read it right. in any case, it is disappointing that rakoff doesn't have some kind of byline in this issue. its writers appear to owe him tremendously for reminding them of their station.

ohhhh, sick, sick, sick. is this what the new yorker is going to be from now on, snooty blather interspersed with masturbatory jaunts into common living and faux deprivation? i read the september 17 issue; i have no recollection of it. i'm halfway through the september 24 style issue, but the only strong thought i've had associated with it is, "didn't they just put out a style issue?" i'm pretty sure it hasn't been a full year since the last one, and what's that all about? the new yorker isn't supposed to be about style, it isn't supposed to be stylish; it's supposed to be smart. i thought i could count on the better part of its staff to refrain from being pompous blowhards between the pages, at least. maybe someone is giving them too much leash. maybe someone is setting a poor example. (*ahemREMNICKahem*)

and yet, like a battered, co-dependent lover, i can't say good-bye. i believe that everything could still be turned around, if we both want it enough. be it optimism or delusion, it's led me to purchase a ticket to gladwell v. gopnik at this year's new yorker festival. i trust my malcolm to make a case i can get behind, or at least appreciate. he'll never offend me so much as this last batch of vainglorious twaddle did, and he'd have to work awfully hard to top his highest offense to date: the "talk of the town" piece on student discipline, in which he tried to convince me that the world would have been far worse off if robert oppenheimer had been expelled after trying to kill a teacher with a poison apple, because if he had been we'd never have been able to melt the faces off of all those women and children in japan. ohhhhh, i was very angry that day, and the day after that. but i forgave him, because his heart was almost entirely in the right place, and because he was thinking about sports. he gets a little irrational about sports. sadly, even when he isn't thinking about sports at all, sometimes he doesn't think his arguments through from every angle. it's sweet, in its way, that he thinks everyone must see the same shades of good and bad as he does, because they tend to be sweet shades. but it's also naïve and a substantial soft spot in his armor, and i hope that it doesn't create problems in the upcoming debate, because if he doesn't mop the floor with gopnik, i will, and i will not do it in a polite, parliamentary manner. i will rush the stage and roll his fool ass. and i'll take the subway both ways to do it.

white lies

folks are spitting wooden nickels about the tillman affair, and rightly so. but i would like to take this opportunity to make sure everyone knows that this is far from the first time this sort of misinformation has been offered to the families of soldiers killed in iraq, or to the public. way back in september of 2005, news broke about a young man named kenneth ballard whose family had been notified via letter that his death in May of 2004 was the result of "a firefight with insurgents." over a year later, it was revealed that ballard was actually killed by the accidental firing of a machine gun after he and his platoon had returned from fighting. a 2006 review of army case files revealed that the families of six other soldiers, including tillman, had been given similarly false information. now, you might think to yourself, "only six? panties in a bunch much, juniper?" but the review only explored the deaths of 810 troops, or about 26 percent of the total number of servicemen killed in iraq and afghanistan by the time of the study. most of the cases involve a repainting of the situation similar to that in ballard's case—a stated cause of enemy fire or combat with insurgents when there were no such things in the general area at the time of death—but one soldier died of a heart attack after inhaling something sketchy from an aerosol can, and his family was apparently told that he died of completely natural causes (or that he was scared to death by insurgents; the article doesn't go into much detail). jesse buryj's mother had to file a freedom-of-information-act request in order to obtain a copy of her son's autopsy report, which revealed he'd died of a friendly-fire gunshot wound to the back, even though she had been told he'd been hit by a truck that had run a checkpoint.

i have no way of knowing who initiates these falsifications or what the motivation is. there could be sincerely good intentions at the root of it, a desire on someone's part to make these deaths seem a little less senseless or unnecessary. but given the way in which detractors of the war have been viciously and repeatedly attacked for chipping away at the morale of the troops or suggesting that fallen soldiers might have died in vain, i can not quite silence the angry, cynical part of my brain that thinks there could be a pr angle even to this aspect of the war's management. one cindy sheehan was hard enough to silence, wasn't she? if these families can be placated, if we keep using the words "enemy" and "insurgent," if we convince those suffering a loss here in the states that that loss is on the hands of a distant, bloodthirsty enemy, maybe they won't remember that that enemy is one we created out of nothing with our own war-hungry hands. maybe they won't let their fury and misery circle back around to its logical target. maybe.

whatever the reason, it's a terrible thing to do to. when the truth of the matter comes to light however many months or years later, it's as if the family is being informed of the death for the first time; essentially, they have to rip the scab off and start the grieving process anew, only this time with the added shock of having been lied to by the country their son or daughter or mother or father died serving. that's quite a blow. in fact, i can't think of many hits that would come harder—or that would be more likely to make the families of the fallen question the righteousness of the cause. just ask peggy buryj:

When your son's a soldier you know they could get killed. You know, you pray. But you know it—it's a reality. . . . Some—maybe some mothers could say, well, it didn't matter—oh, how he died. Well, it does. It's—it's important. It's a part of history. It's a part of my son's life, how he died. And they're not going take that away from him. . . . I like to think they think it hurts too bad to tell families that their son was killed by friendly fire. But that's not the truth. What hurts is not knowing. . . . The people that have come forward—and made the stink, and . . . questioned it, are the people that are getting the attention. . . . [Army officials] have two options, to tell me who killed my son, or to have a very good reason—why they can't figure it out. Those are their only two options. And one will not be acceptable.

but you hurt our feelings!

so, it looks like menino and curtatone did decide to milk the "emotional distress" angle and have managed to squeeze turner broadcasting for about $1 million more than the response effort to quell the mooninite invasion actually cost the city and the surrounding areas of somerville and cambridge. greedy, greedy bostonians--it's people like you who are driving conservatives to stump for caps on damages for pain and suffering, and in this instance i might be persuaded to concur. sure, $1 million is no great loss for tbs and probably less than they would ultimately have paid to put an end to all this, and you've vowed to put the money to great use in our homeland security and transportation departments--but you demanded it because you were in a position to do so, not because it was your legitimate due. that isn't justice, it's bullying, and no one likes a bully. once the money was promised to you you agreed not to pursue legal action against the network or the ad agency, but you're still pressing those ridiculous charges against berdovsky and stevens, who were operating as agents of the network and the ad agency. how is that sensible? and will any percentage of your winnings go toward making it more difficult to attach a magnetic battery-operated device to the I-93 bridge? because as proud as you all are of the hub's coordinated ground operations, the real issue here is that these things were all over the place before anyone responsible for examining them knew of their existence, and all the mbta improvements you can pull out of your hat won't erase that fact from the public consciousness--particularly the consciousness of those interested in doing harm. these were blinking and flashing and you didn't see them; an actual bomb would probably call far less attention to itself. how much does expanding homeland security response capabilities really count for if we don't have any reliable preventive measures in place? and what exactly do you mean by "other important community initiatives," ms. coakley? because if any of this money funds measures not related to citywide safety, you'll have proven that you support a legal system that caters to well-represented and well-connected plaintiffs out for all they can get. at least, you'll have proven that you support such a system when you are the plaintiff. i have a friend in public defense who would be very, very disappointed in you.

at any rate, your vindictiveness in this matter is incredibly unbecoming--common and predictable, but unbecoming. and now you've hurt my feelings. i expect this wrong will be rectified in the issuance of my state tax refund.

boston legal . . . ish.

if berdovsky and stevens are actually prosecuted for possession of a hoax device and disorderly conduct--the witch-hunty and specious charges they were held on bond for yesterday--i'm going to flip out like a ninja. michael rich, the attorney representing the two men, has a paypal account in place for clients; if you felt like it, you could donate some sympathy bucks and a note to compensate him for the time he's had to waste thus far refuting those charges. i'm not giving up hope that reason will prevail; since the boards were magnetic, their posting had zero physical impact on any of the structures they were mounted on, making the act of hanging them a lesser example of disorderly conduct than walking up and down the block taping "have you seen my cat?" fliers to telephone poles. and possession of a hoax device requires that a person knowingly place another person in fear of serious physical injury by suggesting that a harmless device is an "infernal machine"; how could they even attempt to prosecute these guys for such a charge in this case? all they knowingly engaged in was a sponsored ad campaign, which happened to involve batteries; if anyone's responsible for placing others in fear of bodily harm, it's the local media. crazy. crazy.

and while we're discussing state laws, seeing as how we've (for now, at least) legalized same-sex marriage and all, don't you thing it's about time we emended this section a smidge?

rage within the machine

i can not get over this aqua teen hullabaloo and how many local politicians are squeezing it for every penny it's worth in an attempt to puff up their case for squeezing turner broadcasting for every penny it's worth, and i've never been so ashamed to be a lifelong boston local. i thought moving to somerville was the best, most happy-making thing i'd ever done, but now somerville's mayor, joe curtatone, has climbed atop a soapbox all his very own to do his part in rousing the rabble. i find the level of public ire aimed at the network and the men who planted the ads perverse and somewhat baffling, and i would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt dismay and bewilderment at my homeland's eagerness to promote paranoia and irrational levels of fear and outrage. so here are some excerpts from mayor angry joe's announcements, and following those excerpts are my rebuttals.

Somerville’s Mayor Joe Curtatone has joined the growing chorus of city and state officials who want charges brought against those responsible for putting electrical devices under area bridges and overpasses.

Curtatone announced Wednesday night that Somerville is exploring both civil and criminal legal action against all of the parties responsible for putting suspicious electrical devices up. Curtatone said he will coordinate his actions with the City of Boston, the state Attorney General’s Office, and the Middlesex County District Attorney, but he did not rule out the possibility of the city taking unilateral legal action.

"These devices may not be explosive, but they’re far from harmless--they’ve done a lot of damage to local budgets and to the taxpayers of Somerville and other area communities," Curtatone said. "It doesn’t matter if they were discovered after three hours or three weeks. You can’t put circuit boards with battery power packs under bridges and overpasses without somebody eventually--and correctly--deciding that they’re potentially dangerous."

no, mayor angry joe, it was not correct for people to decide they were potentially dangerous. it would have been correct for people to wonder whether they might have been dangerous, and it would have been correct for a police team to quietly inspect one or two in order to decide whether or not they were dangerous, but it was shockingly far from correct for the city to be disabled from one end to the other because people had decided, without any exploration into the issue, that these things were probably dangerous. the devices didn't damage local budgets--insanely reactionary local officials did, and that only happened in boston. in new york, where things have actually been blown up, local officials employed reason and tact and concern for public mental health and dealt with the devices sanely. their budgets aren't ravaged, because they took the time to uncover the fact that the devices were, in fact, one hundred percent harmless.

Curtatone noted that the city would not only seek reimbursement for its costs but would work hard to impose criminal penalties or fines that would discourage similar stunts in the future. "In the current climate, we need to make sure that no one else decides that this is a cost-effective marketing strategy," Curtatone said.

no one is responsible for the disruption but you, menino, and whoever else was involved in revving up the sirens; if the city requires reimbursement for the costs of a disproportionately alarmist and massive bomb-squad scavenger hunt, it should come out of your pockets. let these poor guys out of jail already. they were hired to disperse promotional materials, which in and of themselves caused zero damage to the city or its public works. in the current climate, you have a responsibility to make sure you don't sound false alarms or needlessly terrify your constituents. we need to make sure no one else decides yours was a cost-effective defensive or investigative strategy.

"There may be a tendency on the part of some people to laugh this off because it was a marketing stunt designed to promote a cartoon show on cable television. But I guarantee that the taxpayers of Somerville and surrounding cities aren’t laughing--and neither are the commuters and the public safety professionals who had to cope with the consequences," Curtatone said.

i'm laughing. at least, i was, until you made me too angry to carry on with it. i get that you're mad, you're embarrassed, you feel as if you've been punk'd, and you want to focus the blame on someone else. but that's childish, and it's not the sort of behavior taxpayers and commuters like to see from their elected officials. we want our public safety officials to make us feel safe, and there's no worse way for them to fail us in that respect than to prove, as they did yesterday, that they don't know what they're looking for or at or how to manage us and our city when they come across something eye-catching. and the consequences, as i've mentioned, were of public safety professionals' actions, not those of a cartoon show or a cable network. their actions were harmless, as was proved by the lack of harm caused by identical actions all across the country. boston screwed up, and now it's time for it to 'fess up. you guys wicked flew off the handle. i know it, you know it, everybody knows it; own it.

According to the Boston Herald, Boston spent $1 million in overtime costs investigating the stunt and dealing with its aftermath.

As city and state attorneys laid groundwork for criminal charges and lawsuits, cops seized 27-year-old Arlington multimedia artist Peter Berdovsky, who posted film on his Web site boasting that he and friends planted the battery-wired devices, and Sean Stevens, 28, of Charlestown. Both were jailed overnight on charges of placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct.

these charges are obscene. these guys hung pictures on poles. if the pictures hadn't been battery wired, we'd be hailing them as underground art superstars. they'd be the commonwealth's christo and jeanne-claude. there was no hoax; the objects were what they were, and no one tried to portray them as otherwise until city officials became involved. in other, less excitable cities, police took one down, found out what it was, and called the television network. the network told them where the rest of the ads could be found, and people took them down--end of story. no disorder resulted, and none was called for. these men are not responsible for what went on yesterday. let them go. seriously. let them go.

"This is outrageous activity to get publicity for a failing show," said Menino, referring to the battery-operated light-up ads for the Cartoon Network’s "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," which sparked at least nine bomb scares in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville.

Menino promised to sue Turner Broadcasting Co., the Cartoon Network’s parent company, and criminally prosecute Berdovsky and anyone else responsible for the devices, and to petition the FCC to pull the network’s license.

"I am pleased by the prompt, professional and well-coordinated response of law enforcement at all levels to this series of discoveries, and relieved that none of the devices presents a danger to the public. The investigation is ongoing, but there is no reason for anyone to panic."

first, this show is anything but failing. it's one of the most popular shows the network has ever aired, and has been practically since it debuted about six years ago. second, the ads didn't spark bomb scares; the bomb squads who shut down traffic to take soil samples and detonate LED panels at sites where the ads were found sparked bomb scares, and that should never have happened. the lawsuits are rubbish, as i've already discussed, and the idea of getting the fcc involved is so outrageous that i'm practically licking the carpet, my jaw's dropped so far open. the fcc doesn't regulate the actions of television fans or any of the things that television network employees do in any arena outside of a national broadcast, and cable channels are by and large out of the fcc's jurisdiction. pull their license? because you didn't get their ads? and now, now, he understands that there's no reason to panic? get the fuck outta here.

Laura Crimaldi and Michele McPhee of the Boston Herald contributed to this report.

hats off to you, ladies. in your place, i could not have performed my journalistic duties so unemotionally as you have done. but really, i mean, you can tell me: how many times did the two of you almost choke on your coffee while collecting these quotes? spit-take city, right? it had to have been. it's o.k., you and i, we're not alone. honest.

listen, joe, tom--all over america, people are rolling their eyes at us, and you're only making it worse. this thing got botched in a big way, but it isn't too late for you to save face. say you overreacted out of a sincere and profound concern for your citizens, but you have realized your error and want to apologize to the public for causing unwarranted distress. say in the future you won't act so thoughtlessly, and let's all get on with our day. do not say berdovsky and stevens deserve to be in jail for threatening public welfare, because that's bollocks, and don't try to convince me that the city was damaged by a few dozen colored bulbs. it was damaged by your failure as leaders. don't continue to fail us by refusing to take responsibility. the city doesn't need to hear from politicians about this; be men.


update, 2/1/07, 2:49 PM: berdovsky and stevens have been released on bail, and mumbles is maybe beginning to blush a bit about having come down so hard on them, claiming now that the only culprits he has any real interest in are the board executives at turner broadcasting. but that's still crazy, and he's still not sorry, and i'm still pissed.

in a post-9/11 world

what does this look like to you? a lite-brite, right? or something that might be hung on a refrigerator in a house where an eight-year-old child lives? perhaps you recognize it as what it is--a depiction of a relatively (though, apparently, not universally) well-known cartoon character who will be making an appearance in a feature film that's coming out in march. but you have failed the "war on terror" rorschach, because anyone who appreciated the constant peril america is facing in these dangerous and troubling times would instantly recognize this object as a bomb and make numerous hysterical calls to authorities, who would react in an accordingly hysterical manner and deploy multiple bomb squads, halting traffic for hours and sending an entire city into a shrieking, swooning fit. or, alternatively, such a person would make a calm and informative call to authorities, expressing muted curiosity over the nature of the object, and authorities would react in an accordingly hysterical manner and deploy multiple bomb squads, halting traffic for hours and sending an entire city into a shrieking, swooning fit. at least, that's how we roll here in beantown.

i appreciate the need for swift measures to ensure public safety, and of course it's better to be safe than sorry when dealing with a mysterious, blinking box. but the way boston officials dealt with this situation created mass panic where there had been none and where there had been no need for any, and the fact that these innocuous circuit boards have been up and functioning all over the city for about three weeks isn't likely to quell anyone's fear about the ease with which a person could install a less harmless electronic device. the ad campaign has been running for weeks in nine other cities, and police in those places managed to cope with the situation with a minimum of shouting and foaming and public uproar. governor deval patrick, whom i was so proud of only a few short months ago, wants to prosecute the two men who, after being hired by a third-party ad agency, hung the boards, as well as turner broadcasting, the parent company of the cartoon network, for the full cost of the response effort, and i think that's ridiculous. if my son's friend leaves a plastic snake on my kitchen floor and i see it and lose my mind and throw my microwave at it, i don't get to sue that boy's parents for the cost of the appliance and the amount i'll have to pay someone to come in and fix the dent in the linoleum; that boy isn't responsible for my extreme overreaction. a non-crazy person would take a moment or two to assess the situation before calling in a swat team--even if that non-crazy person had once been bitten by a snake. what happened in this city yesterday was nonsensical and embarrassing, and turner broadcasting isn't to blame for it.

mayor menino, whom i've also stuck up for adamantly countless times in the past, says, "it is outrageous, in a post-9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme." but what's really outrageous is that, knowing the emotional and psychological state of most americans, we still can't take the time, or simply don't have the means, to distinguish between a marketing scheme and a citywide act of terrorism before we initiate the kind of large-scale response that leaves a still-shaken populace soiling its misinformed drawers. there are plenty of people who deserve some disappointed glares, but i don't think any of them work for adult swim.

the two men currently being held on bond in the incident, peter berdovsky and sean stevens, are local multimedia artists who specialize in lighting effects and vj events. you can see photos of events they've worked on here, and you can tell mayor menino to take a deep breath and admit to some culpability in the madness here.

it's the way w. plays the game

"the decider" would have been an excellent name for a batman villain, don't you think? he could have tag-teamed with the riddler and the puzzler, spinning our gadget-laden protagonist into tizzy of flabbergasted reeling. batman would be challenged to come up with an answer to a dauntingly complex query, and then, when he offered his answer, no matter how solidly reasoned or correct it was, the decider would cackle, "that's a presumption that's simply not accurate," and the torture would begin anew.

bush has traded in his "decider" crown and scepter for the more grown-up military uniform of the "decision maker," but in this case the clothes don't make--or reform--the man, and his antics are every bit as bullheaded and loathesome under the new design. "i've picked the plan that i think is most likely to succeed," he says, and "some are condemning a plan before it's even had a chance to work." but this is such an obscenely and infuriatingly oblivious line at this point that robin and i are left too speechless and fuming to even toss up the obligatory "holy tunnel vision, batman!" that the audience is so rightly expecting. those of us faithful to the series know that the "plan" has had myriad chances to work, but it has not done so and will not do so, and trotting it out again with a fanfare in the key of e instead of c makes one wonder if the scripts for this particular drama are being written by the ghost of chuck jones. maybe somewhere some hopelessly sensitive child is sincerely rooting for wile e. coyote's success, but the majority of onlookers have always only snickered softly, shaken their heads, and muttered, "dumbass."

of course, no one dies when the bombs being detonated in the desert are made by acme, and when your favorite fictional dc evildoer reappears after an absence with a bag full of the same old tricks you're more than happy to welcome him, confident that he'll be summarily thwarted in the end. here in the real world, though, i'm afraid that the forces of good and sensible thought may have met their match in the decision maker. who will save us? anyone? anyone? i need a hero, and cowboys need not apply.


(signal courtesy of ElvenSarah)

pictures in invisible ink

it's secret pal day here in the states—at least, i think it is. it might have been yesterday, and it might be this coming sunday; the little-known holidays are a bit like floating islands. but they're no less worth celebrating for that, and of course there's no one i'd rather secretly celebrate with than my #1 secret boyfriend. awwww, aren't we cute? now forget you ever saw us. i can neither confirm nor deny having anything to do with that image.

what i can confirm is that this week's new yorker contains malcolm's latest article, which he made a point of speaking right up about the second the issue hit the stands. obviously, after our unfortunate misunderstanding regarding his last piece, he wasn't taking any chances about provoking my bitter, secret wrath. he needn't have worried, though; it's early yet, but all signs point to the universe being more solidly on our side in this new year.

when i stepped through my front door the wednesday evening before last, i did so onto my january 8 issue of the new yorker, which had fallen open to the table of contents after being violently shoved through the (more than wide enough) mail slot. i looked down at its ragged edges and crunched corners and thought, first, "if that poem was from the mailman, i'm in bigger trouble than i thought, because he's taken to destroying the things i love," and second, "oooohhh, i see; the mailman is jealous—'cause my boyfriend sent me a leeeeeetter!" you might be interested to know that january is national letter-writing month, making this revelation all cosmic and adorable. but you might just as easily be not interested at all, and so i'll get on with the story. *ahem*

malcolm's name is very pretty in italics, with all its graceful "l"s and round, welcoming vowels. it's so pretty that i sat right down on the hallway floor to gaze at it, and once i did that i had my third thought:

"enron? aw, damn."

fact: i am not business minded. i don't follow stock reports or bone up on mergers or care what steve jobs calls his company, i'm not shocked or whipped into a scandal-ogling frenzy when corporations do things that hurt their shareholders or employees, and i don't expect anyone i invest my money with to care about what happens to me after i've handed over that money. i have a checking account and a savings account, i pay my bills, i avoid stores that utilize business practices i can't get behind, and that is everything that i have or would like to have to do with global markets. so i was pretty sure that there was nothing more i'd be excited to learn about enron, and besides, malcolm had already written an article about enron, and while i appreciate his enthusiasm and his willingness to doggedly worry a subject until the knot of it gives and falls into a simpler, more linear construct . . . actually, i appreciate that rather a lot . . . and that first enron article was only kind of about enron, and it wasn't half bad . . . i mean, i had to at least give it a chance, didn't i? because i trust the guy.

so i leaned back against the front door in my zipped-up coat and started reading, and i was on the third page before i realized i'd never taken my bag off from over my shoulder, that's how right i was to keep the faith.

i won't lie to you, kids, i really don't care about the enron case in and of itself, and nothing malcolm or anybody else says is likely to induce any radical upheaval in the extent to which my eyes glaze over at business speak. but at some point along the way, out of sheer necessity, this piece changes from an article about enron into something that is only shaped like an article about enron, so that it can more fully become the thing it started as. see, knots come undone a loop at a time, but you can't untie one without constantly reminding yourself of the string's continuity; the process of disentangling a knot has to be as much about the whole as the loops. you have to picture the whole, follow that length of material from one end of the snarl through all its ups and downs and ins and outs, imagine the twists and snags at the center, the part that's hidden from sight—and then you have to move that picture to the back of your mind and focus the rest of your attention on one small, isolated section at a time. i can do this with actual, physical knots; malcolm can do it with stories, which, when they're worth telling, are built just like knots. and while nothing, apparently, is gnarlier than american corporate law, and even though business transactions can be vast and fluid and abstract, at the middle of this particular knot there's nothing but us—us, not just a handful of enron employees and some ruined investors. what went wrong with enron goes wrong in countless other realms all the time, and this story works because it, nearly all alone in the googolplex write-ups on the company's downfall, actually points that out.

so, i don't know what to say about jeffrey skilling. i have absolutely no idea, after reading the piece twice and following the public discourse on the case and studying the law review that inspired and informed the article (the key points of said law review being so surprisingly enthralling, by the way, that i'm not even going to comment on its more wince-worthy spelling and grammatical errors—starting now), whether "fraud" is an entirely accurate description of the wrongs that were committed, and i'm not at all convinced that skilling should have been held as singularly responsible for those wrongs as he's been, regardless of how one chooses to categorize them. if i didn't know what good company i was in, i'd probably be deeply troubled by that. instead, i'm going to accept that there are things going on in the world that are currently beyond my grasp and focus on the fractions of the article that, for me, lit up parts of various other big pictures. like this one:

mysteries require that we revisit our list of culprits and be willing to spread the blame a little more broadly. because if you can't find the truth in a mystery—even a mystery shrouded in propaganda—it's not just the fault of the propagandist. it's your fault as well.

ooooooooooh, he's mad. he's also right. naturally, people have already tried to run him up a pole for saying a thing like that, misconstruing (or misrepresenting; i'd swear on a chicago 15th that at least a few of them are definitely misrepresenting) his stance as a defense of enron's practices, which were unquestionably sketchy (if, perhaps, not exactly shady; but again, i'm not certain) and deserving of condemnation. in his own explanation of his intentions malcolm refers to the article as a "semi-defense," but i doubt i'd have phrased it even that strongly. what the work boils down to is a reframing of enron's breakdown, and it should force people to think about why the word "enron" inspires such an instantaneous flood of negativity, and why we feel justified in giving that feeling free reign. i can't imagine the majority of americans not saying skilling deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, but i'm every bit as skeptical that a majority of that majority could enumerate skilling's sins. it's imperative, though, that we force ourselves to understand why we've come to the conclusions we've come to in matters like this—matters where futures, where lives, are at stake—because if we fail at that step every subsequent action is rendered utterly indefensible.

i'm going to walk away from enron for a bit, though, now, and venture into the deep, dark, chilling woods that are home to all of the other ideas the phrase "mystery shrouded in propaganda" brings to mind.

the president's approval rating in the united states right now is, according to the most recent zogby poll, about 30 percent. (i think that's dizzyingly high, but i'm just one girl.) in april of 2003, right after the start of the war in iraq and the "fall" of baghdad, his approval rating was closer to 70 percent. in 2002, when he was busy trying to make his case for invading iraq, approval of the president dropped consistently from its october, 2001, high of nearly 90 percent to a low of just above 50 percent in february of 2003, and then skyrocketed when he declared the end of major combat. but he's been the same president the entire time, and the war in iraq has been the same war the entire time; most reasonable people recognized that the combat hadn't ended in may of 2003 and was unlikely to wind to a close over a day or two just because the president had said so. the problem, i guess, was that too many people at that point weren't being reasonable; but does it make sense to assume they've become more reasonable since then? the nation's shift in attitude regarding the war is being touted as a collective awakening, hundreds of millions of people suddenly coming to their senses about a president's, a cabinet's, a party's persistent self-interest and disingenuousness. but i don't see it that way.

when bush presented his new strategy for iraq on wednesday, the plan that had won him approval ratings twice as high, not to mention reelection, a few years earlier was torched for being neither new nor, in truth, a strategy. it might seem like the american people have woken up, since they're no longer buying the rhetoric and propaganda they'd seemed so moved by in the past. but it's got nothing to do with learned lessons. a few years ago, what the american people wanted was revenge. now, they want their families back. they haven't learned anything except that they don't enjoy putting their money where their mouths are, and what's worse is they can't see it, because they aren't putting any effort into understanding—truly, completely understanding—why they've changed their minds, or why they made the decision they made in the beginning.

in the previously cited law review, jonathan macey says this about group decision-making dynamics:

[O]nce boards of directors have been in place for a while, they are likely to embrace management’s perspective. More specifically, after a decision is made and defended by a board, it will affect future decisions such that those decisions will comport with earlier actions. For example, studies of the decision-making process that contributed to the escalation of the Vietnam War showed that leaders paid more attention to new information that was compatible with the earlier decisions. They tended to ignore information that contradicted those earlier assumptions. As one researcher observed, “there was a tendency, when actions were out of line with ideas for decisionmakers to align their actions.” Once ideas and beliefs become ingrained in the mind of a board of directors, the possibility of altering those beliefs decreases substantially. As Tom Gilovich has argued, “beliefs are like possessions, and when someone challenges our beliefs, it is as if someone criticized our possessions.”

in fact, someone had criticized our possessions, and us ourselves, and had ended 2,973 lives to bring the insult home. everything we knew and trusted had been brought to its knees; our hearts were broken. in order for oversight to be effective, macey says, it must be objective, and there was no hope of the average american citizen approaching objectivity at that time. when management's perspective was that we should invade afghanistan and take out the people who had attacked us, no one would have dreamed of dissenting. but when the management selected a new enemy and proceeded to paint it as every bit as much of a threat as the original enemy, if not worse, when they tried to take 300 million people's fear and confusion and misery into their hands and squeeze it, pressing their thumbs into the tears and punctures until everyone was wailing and blind, it stopped being an issue of choosing whether or not to dissent; under those circumstances, most people, if they don't fight to retain it, lose the ability to think objectively, or at all.

so objective refutations of flimsy assertions not only got buried in obfuscations and distractions and reiterations of catch phrases but were actively ridiculed by party members and newly rabid patriots who couldn't imagine any circumstances under which questioning the direction their leader's finger was pointing in didn't amount to treason. when that finger pointed to war, they didn't seek out information that would prove that such a move was neither inevitable nor necessary, even though such information was abundant, and they didn't embrace those ideas when other people pointed them out again and again and again.

the united states chose bush in 2004, after he ran on a platform of intimidation, threadbare slogans, and a guarantee of business as usual. and now that they've gotten what they asked for, what they've earned by failing to recognize or even look for the truth about a situation they had a massive investment in and should have been scrounging for every shred and scrap of objective intelligence on, what they've built for themselves by failing to just plain think,

they've turned en masse to point their own fingers at the people they placed the order with and say, "how dare you. how dare you be dishonest. how dare you do this to me."

when people thought enron was winning, they didn't want to know anything else. someone was responsible for providing them with information, and the information they were getting from that someone was to their liking; they let that be the end of the story. but the information being furnished wasn't the whole story, and while its purveyors must be held accountable for their actions, it is not their fault that no one involved wanted to admit—or even know—that they were meeting with far less success than they were being led to believe.

as dense as the bush administration's fog of propaganda was, there were elements of information that shed enough light to cut through it. some people affixed them to their pith helmets and marched up and down the street ringing bells, while 200 million people hurled fruits and vegetables and stones and slurs and flags and ribbons at them. those rioting mobs weren't different people at the time of last november's election; they just voted differently. the information they're getting isn't pleasant anymore, and they'd like to hear from someone else. but how much sense does that make? how does that signify an awakening? you could throw every last republican in the country into the grand canyon with a pocket full of trail mix and a pound of jerky and tell them that it's their turn to fight and sacrifice, but of course your problem wouldn't be solved. because the untruth that was sold to you was one you, at the time, said you were willing to pay for, and when that transaction leads to disaster, it's your fault as well. america, like a willful child, has gone from a parent who won't give it a cookie to one it thinks probably will. certain circumstances might change, but the practice that brought them about won't, and when we decide we don't like this cookie in however many years and would actually like a popsicle, we'll switch loyalties again. no objectively reasonable thought in sight, not from sea to shining sea.

i couldn't care less about enron. what i care about is people making solid decisions based on all of the verifiable information at their disposal and then accepting responsibility for the fallout from those decisions. what i care about is blame being assigned as it should be, by people who are in a position to know where that blame honestly lies.

jeffrey skilling is taking a hard, more or less solitary fall for a collective wrong that involved all kinds of irresponsible investments and convoluted hand-offs and insufficient models and impossibly unreadable documents—but he's been convicted of fraud. i don't know enough about corporate law to say whether or not, based on what i've read, that's a crime he committed, but i, like malcolm, would like his conviction and associated sentence to be something no one had any questions about. i'd like as many convictions as possible to go that way. whatever your interest in business, whatever country you hang your hat in, you owe it to, at the absolute least, yourself to make certain your legal system is operating in a just and clear-eyed manner.

sometimes ours fails. but it's our fault as well, and i am pointing my very angry finger at an extremely broad population of people who i'm afraid will never, ever care about a word i'm saying.

*sigh* i won't fix the universe tonight, anyway. so i'll close my little rant with this: all of you out there fighting the good fight, working like hell to think with the best parts of your heads, trying to hold yourselves and each other up while you watch the world around you fail you and fail you and fail you, doing all you can to make sense of it even when you have no reason to hope that it will ever make sense: you've got an extremely loyal pal.

i feel bad about other people's necks

victory, noun: achievement of mastery or success in a struggle or endeavor against odds or difficulties

here is the monologue that i imagine took place in bush's head after the nineteen trillionth person asked him what he actually meant when he said "victory in iraq is still a possibility" and, when bush appeared confused by the question, one of his aides showed him how to look words up in the dictionary, yielding the above definition:

"so, 'victory in iraq' would be . . . well, let's see. since the difficulty we are struggling to master is primarily that the united states has never put enough troops on the ground in iraq to quell an insurgence which has spread its little wings and taken flight as a fledgling civil war and which at this point requires far more political restructuring than policing while simultaneously training what, from all reports, is an almost entirely green iraqi military, 'victory in iraq' must mean more troops. right?

"right! round up the men and load the humvees, boys! victory is ours!"

oh, um, that middle part? out of character for the president, right? that's the monologue that took place when i temporarily inhabited bush's body and grabbed his brain up in my hands and shook it like a tambourine, which, of course, jogged all the bats and goop loose and totally freaked me out, forcing me to flee and return control of his mental processes to him just in time for him to come to that dastardly, simple-as-a-two-piece-jigsaw conclusion.

the problem, i think, is that "more troops" is as far as the president--and possibly a vast number of other officials--cares to quantify matters, and he doesn't seem to grasp that there are different levels of "more," each with its own degree of effectiveness. our version of "more," to date, has had a degree of effectiveness of somewhere between 0 and -174.

between february and april of 2004, the coalition presence in iraq increased by close to 23,000 troops. it held about steady until november of that year, and between november 2004 and february 2005 it increased by about 18,000 troops, to 180,000. but in march it was down to 172,000, by april it was down to 164,000, and it dropped and dropped by dribs and drabs . . . so between september and november of 2005, we sent another 23,000, bringing the total up to 183,000. by january of 2006, that number was down to about 157,000. by the end of 2006, the troop strength was around 160,000, give or take.

at no point since the invasion have coalition ("coalition"? it sounds goofy now, doesn't it? my coach told me there was no "i" in "team," and even in "coalition" there are two of them) forces totaled more than 185,000 troops--and at no point since the invasion have the coalition forces been on the receiving end of anything that might be even loosely referred to as "victory." so one could conclude that the "more"s we've been contributing--20,000 here, 20,000 there, but all bringing us back to about where we started--are the wrong sort of "more."

and, of course, many people have come to that conclusion. "bad president!" they cry. "you can bang our heads into this wall until the end of time, but i swear to you, they will never break open and shower you with candy!"

"unpatriotic naysayers!" the president shouts back, swinging his stick in aimless arcs and reaffixing the elastic of his party hat over the sides of his blindfold. "staying the course always leads to candy! it's candy land! iraq is just a comma-shaped molasses swamp! now shut up and give me my Now and Laters!"

bush's Now and Laters are extra sticky and taste like ass, and the wrappers read a little like this:

Defying public opinion polls and the newly empowered Democratic leadership, Bush on Wednesday moved to send 21,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq while saying it was a mistake not to have had more forces there previously.

"The question is whether our new strategy will bring us closer to success. I believe that it will," Bush said in excerpts released by the White House before the speech. Stepping back now "would force a collapse of the Iraqi government" and could mean U.S. troops staying even longer, he said.

bleccchhhhhh.

yes, it was a mistake to not have had more forces there previously. here's the thing: YOU ARE NOT GOING TO HAVE MORE FORCES THERE NOW. YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE EXACTLY AS MANY FORCES AS YOU HAVE HAD THE ENTIRE TIME. I AM TALKING VERY LOUDLY, MR. BUSH, JUST IN CASE THE PROBLEM FOR THE PAST FOUR YEARS HAS BEEN THAT A BIT OF FLUFF HAS BLOWN INTO YOUR LEFT EAR AND GOTTEN STUCK.

this "surge" isn't a solution--or a surge; it's maintenance, and that maintenance is of a failing status quo. 21,500 more troops means leaving our military and the citizens of iraq where they've been, and that means thousands more dead. it isn't enough to effect the change that needs to take place. it isn't enough to fill the positions our soldiers have been scrabbling to fill. it isn't enough to do anything but make bush look worse in the eyes of americans and the world and deepen the pool of blood that's accumulated in the middle eastern desert. it's more of the same, and in my opinion a lot of the people who are up in arms about that have little or no right to be: more of the same is exactly what they demanded when they put bush back in office in 2004. i, on the other hand, ought to have the right to secede by now, i've been so staunchly against him since day 1. i want to hope that there's still a chance that a more convincing show of humility and regret on bush's part could win over a few global allies and earn a troop commitment from other countries that could put us, finally, on solid footing. i want to hope that--but i don't. the pompous stubbornness of a few old men has likely doomed us and our soldiers to a sacrifice most people never cared or intended to make.

i don't want one more death, and i don't want this war to go on for one more day. i never wanted it. but we destroyed a country, we did, and i am equally disinclined to watch us stick our hands in our pockets, shrug, and back away from the ruins like a clumsy kid in a mikasa outlet. bush wants to devote another billion dollars to reconstruction efforts, but the buildings are not all that got broken, and even if you pay for the vase, when you get home and open its box it will still be shattered. when you close the box back up, put it in the back of the hall closet, and walk away from it, it will still be shattered. to make it a vase again, you have to fix it. you can't reassemble it, glue up a third of the fractures, and say, "well, it isn't my fault if it doesn't want to try" when the water you pour into it blows out the sides and soaks the carpet. you have to fix it.

21,500 new troops is not how. it hasn't been how for the past four years, and yet we have done it again and again. not that i know how; i'm starting to wonder if, at this point in the debacle, there is a how. but to do nothing, to cut our losses (but they wouldn't really all be our losses, would they? or even mostly ours) and withdraw, as some people are suggesting? to holler "suck it up and you'll be fine!" over our shoulders as we flee the scene? i don't want to try to live with that.

was there a solution, for a while? and we ignored it? and now we have all this blood on our hands, and because we can't bear to look at them we squeeze our eyes shut and sit on them.

stop it. hold them up and own them, and apologize. and beg--beg--the rest of the world to help you put this thing you've broken into some kind of order. forget about victory, forget it; just do what's right.

care about this.

i guess i don't really worry all that much about fair use and the legal implications of pointing out negative attributes of more powerful media entities, mostly because i've never had to. i'm toiling in profound obscurity here at pretentious hack inc., and the vast stretches of meaningless patter connecting the posts where i'm attempting to actually say something probably make me seem harmless enough to anyone who comes across my "work." more importantly, i've never cost anyone an advertising contract—and negative publicity is just publicity until it starts to cut into the revenue.

spocko, by calling advertisers funding the san francisco–based radio station ksfo and asking them if they actually stand behind the vile things being said on the air, has offended the accountants at abc/disney (the station's owners), and they, in turn, are attempting to smother spocko with a lawsuit-shaped pillow. this is a beastly abuse of power; all of the media he sampled was well within fair-use bounds, and advertisers have a right (some might go so far as to say an obligation) to know what they're supporting. if the highly offensive statements spocko's brought to light are hurting the business, the business ought to take it out on the makers of the statements, not the whistle blower. but what a crazy dreamer i am, daring to imagine a corporation choosing to hold itself accountable for its own wrongdoings.

i wondered for a second if maybe i was being a little hypocritical, after all my passionate avowals of my desire to punch glenn beck and others in the face. and that could very well be the case, but here's the conclusion i came to: i said that i would like to punch glenn beck in the face, not that i or anyone else actually ought to punch glenn beck in the face, and i didn't giggle about it at the end. besides, even if i were serious and followed through, beck would recover, seeing as i have the upper-body strength of a small child with a wasting disease. i have never, not once, suggested anyone mutilate his body or take his life, and i wouldn't. big difference. and i don't even have a sponsor; i choose not to recommend giving people i don't like the chair of my own free will.

must be why abc keeps throwing out my résumé.

i am angry at slate

no doubt the site's staff are weeping into their macchiatos about it, too, but i won't hide it for their sake. i'm too disappointed to care about sparing anyone's feelings.

the idea of a filmed execution was always, in my mind, one of those morbid jokes thrown out at the tail end of a conversation about a society's ethical and intellectual decline; you know, "if they keep it up with these reality shows, there won't be anything left to put on the air but people eating babies and live executions." the image of a mob of townsfolk gathering around the gallows was a symbol of a darker age, one which we, in our triumphant role as citizens of The Fucking Greatest Fucking Nation Fucking Ever, could laugh about disparagingly from our pre-fab homes with their bleach-coated counters and ultracivilized sofa sets. but i haven't been watching the reality shows, and so i didn't realize how far down the chute things had slid. the cell phone footage of saddam hussein's execution is all over the internet, and while i would expect it to crop up on independent pages and wouldn't have been at all surprised to find it front and center on, say, the fox news site (where, in actuality, it occupies no such position), i was deeply creeped out to see links pointing to pages with names like FunnyVideoSpot.com and comic2.com, and i was terribly unhappy to find the video smack-dab in the center of slate, with its eye-catching red and yellow "graphic content" banner giving the finger to the idea of journalistic decorum. i never looked to jacob weisberg and his apple dumpling gang for even-tempered objectivism, but i did believe i could count on them to not be morally bankrupt sensationalists. sometimes i had to squint to get it to pop up out of its verdana background like a typographic autostereogram, but there was, as a rule, some worthwhile information in almost every piece of work they put up.

almost.

william saletan's "human nature" column, slate's version of a scientific catch-all, may or may not live up to its title. all but one of the ten headlines in the current list involve drugs, fat, or the human reproductive system. i like to think that my own personal nature encompasses a somewhat broader variety of interests and activities, but who knows? i could be kidding myself.

today's column sports the heading, "mop vs. mastectomy: does housework prevent breast cancer?" you, being the astute between-the-lines reader that you are, may already have guessed at the alternate title: "hey, angry feminist! over here! you will not believe how pissed off you're about to get!" the blurb is about a research article recently published in cancer epidemiology biomarkers & prevention which reports a correlation between the amount of housework women perform and breast-cancer risk. there are a number of important factors that should be mentioned in relation to the data reported, such as that the data on housework only included past-year activity and that there was no record of the frequency, duration, and specific intensities of reported occupational activities. i'd also be very curious to know how many children each of the subjects had had, whether any of them underwent fertility treatment in order to become pregnant, whether or not they had breastfed and for what duration . . . things that were, according to its authors, outside the scope of this particular study, which aimed only to explore the relationship between activity levels and cancer, but which are every bit as relevant as other variates that were included, such as age at first pregnancy and education. besides, if they only collected activity data from the past year, they don't have much of a case for that specific relationship, anyhow. women do not get breast cancer because eleven months ago they started vacuuming the house every other sunday instead of twice a week.

or do they? e-zine enthusiasts may never know. saletan, in his skimpy overview of the work, doesn't seem to have any interest in the study's merit or lack thereof. of all the things he could have brought up in this column he is paid to maintain, he chose to close with this zinger:

Male spin: See, women belong in the home. Female spin: Now, for that study of housework and prostate cancer…

oy. maybe we get breast cancer from dismissive un-jokes. i hope it isn't positively correlated with eye strain, because i am squinting and squinting, but i just can't see the sailboat . . .


update, 1/4/07, 1:28 PM: could one tiny blogger have so much power? i wouldn't bet the lint in my pocket on it, but slate has taken the execution footage down and replaced it with frames from comic books about the human toll of the iraq war, and the two newest "human nature" references are to south carolina's proposed intention to start collecting dna from anyone and everyone arrested in the state and nasa's, um, nasa stuff. no pot! no gonads! still a semi-weak one-two close, but with a far more embraceable tone. nothing more than a happy synchronicity, i'm sure, but the sky is very blue and i'm willing to try to forgive and forget. don't think this means you can slouch, though, guys; weisberg, saletan--i've got my eye on you. my squinty, piercing eye.

friday celebrity-letter blogging

dear jon stewart,

i know that this is way, way overdue, but you really rocked the wang back in october. i was the girl to your left in the orchestra pit who "woo hoo"d when you said your home computer was a mac (thanks for the subtle point in my direction in acknowledgment; for the record, i know next to nothing about graphic design, but i'm proud to have been able to provide you, at least in part, with an opening for a joke). it was the first time i had seen you live, but it was far from the first time i had seen your stand-up act. everybody knows that story, and i really wouldn't tell it again, but it becomes hugely important in the context of this letter; i'll try to inject some new life into it.

in what i'm almost entirely certain was the late spring of 1992, a portion of your act was aired as a segment on the mtv half-hour comedy hour, and the only joke from that segment that i remember in its entirety is the one about the inanity of the u.s. military's refusal to allow gay men to enlist. at the time, the DOD's policy on homosexuality was receiving a fair amount of coverage, the freddie mercury tribute concert had been playing on a loop for weeks, and i had recently become close friends with a shy, slight boy whose sexuality was frequently called into question in a none-too-tactful manner by the population of our small-town high school. i was pretty young, but i was already beginning to adopt the strongly liberal stance that has since become the cornerstone of all my daily dealings (i'm surprised anyone can even read my letters, given how smudged and obscured the writing is once my pink, pink heart is finished bleeding all over it). it may be why that joke stuck, or something about your delivery may have made it especially resonant, leading to its longevity in my memory and thus influencing some portion of my social and political development. whatever the case, the moment lodged itself, and i have loved you ever since because of it.

and when you told it again, word for word, at your show this fall—god, i didn't even know what to do. i wanted to squeal and stand on my seat and cry and throw a brick through a window and buy you a state-of-the-art video game console and run out of the building and into the woods and renounce society, because it was my joke, it had been my joke for almost fifteen years, and i hadn't heard it since that first time, and there you were, not fifteen feet away, telling it in person—and because it was my joke that i had heard for the first time fifteen years ago, and you could still tell it and get the same reaction as you had gotten the first time you had told it, because nothing had changed.

this year the u.s. army dropped its recruitment standards to the lowest permissible levels in an effort to meet enlistment targets, which they've been missing by margins greater than any since the 1970s. they're willing to accept recruits who have failed aptitude tests, who have criminal records, who have drug or alcohol problems, and who have health issues that could interfere with their performance; they are not willing to accept healthy, competent, sincere men with spotless records who refuse to lie about who they are. while daniel goure, vice-president of the lexington institute, has said that the main requirement for the army is a high school diploma, only 81 percent of the newest recruits have one. the military feels fine about actively recruiting autistic teenagers, but they'll discharge anyone who's openly gay, regardless of his or her performance, on the grounds that homosexuality is an irredeemable defect. i think that's nonsensical. i think that's INSANE. i know you're with me on this, jon, but while misery may love company, this particular misery is incapable of taking solace in the number of people in its corner, even when one of them is you.

in defense of its new tactics, the army issued a statment affirming that "good test scores do not necessarily equate to quality soldiers . . . test-taking ability does not measure loyalty, duty, honor, integrity or courage." but who you sleep with does? can they honestly believe that? what do they think's gonna happen?

well, you know the answer to that question. and i just wanted to thank you for shining a floodlight on it, then and now. sometimes i can't muster up any hope about the masses finding a way to approach ideas like this with a modicum of logic. but i think maybe you can't, either, and you haven't let that stop you from begging them to do so for the past two decades. so i'll soldier on alongside you, because the folks on the other side were never adorable in my eyes, and they only grow less so with time.

that's it. my best to your family, including that cat with the nine recta and your vomit-slurping pooch. thanks for standing up, and thanks for your dogged, unswerving moral clarity. i don't know how you feel about being a role model, but i feel inexpressibly fortunate to have you as one.

your always-devoted fan, who knew that was you in the rollerblades in that steve martin movie with the christmas tree,

juniper

monday punch-in-the-face blogging: the thanksgiving issue

what i'm giving thanks for this year, darlings, is the strong evidence proffered by my own personal nature-versus-nurture drama that one can easily triumph over one's genetics when it comes to character development and intellectual curiosity. here are five things spoken by my paternal relatives last thursday that made me want to throttle them to within an inch of their lives:

1. "muslims need to be wiped off the face of the planet." (said by my aunt)

2. "i pray for the muslims to accept jesus. i believe that if they could just learn to love christ, they wouldn't be such bad people." (courtesy of my grandfather)

3. "no talking about religion or politics." (spoken by my father approximately seven seconds after i began to attempt to explain the difference between muslims and islamic extremists)

4. "why can't these people just get the hell over themselves?" (dad again, after a brief news report about a group of native americans who staged a small, peaceful protest on thanksgiving)

5. "that wasn't murder, that was just mankind making progress like it's been doing for centuries and centuries. they weren't using all the land." (dad again, making the third time the charm, after i pointed out somewhat sharply that this was, after all, a holiday celebrating the day europeans began their steady invasion and elimination of an entire race of people, and that the remainder of that race had very little to celebrate and a whole lot to be upset about)

when i objected after comment five and tried to wrench some explanation out of dear old dad for how it's o.k. to kill innocent people under any circumstances, he reverted back to his favorite standby: weak pacifists like me would have handed the entire planet over to hitler. this, tragically, is the end of the majority of my conversations with my father, but not necessarily the end of the evening; that comes very shortly after the conclusion of this conversation, when i march out into the kitchen, tell my mother that her husband is the reason i will never believe this world is a decent place to raise a child in, grab my coat, and run out. but perhaps we really should allow it to come to blows just once, and see if that helps any. christmas is right around the corner, after all.

and the hits just keep on comin'

remember a few hours ago when i said i thought maybe i'd never feel good again? well, that was before i read this:

On Monday, the federal office that oversees the nation's family-planning program got a new boss who doesn't believe in birth control. Eric Keroack is a Massachusetts obstetrician-gynecologist who argues that abstinence until marriage is the only healthy choice for women. Until recently, he served as medical director of a pregnancy-counseling organization that runs down contraception and gives out scientifically false health information—for instance, that condoms "offer virtually no protection" against herpes or HPV. Keroack also promotes a wacky piece of pseudoscience: the claim that premarital sex disrupts brain chemistry so as to create a physiological barrier to happy marriage.

In his new role, Keroack will have extensive power to shape the kinds of information disseminated to millions of women. He will be able to develop new guidelines for clinics, set priorities, and determine how scarce dollars get spent, says Marilyn Keefe of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. "We've seen that people in these political slots have a tremendous influence over how programs get implemented," she said.

and now i don't think it, i know.

NARAL pro-choice america has set up a petition that will be sent to mike leavitt, secretary of health and human services, urging him to reject keroack's appointment. sign it. seriously, like, right this second. sign it. that is, of course, unless you, too, believe "that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness," in which case you may take this time to do something else, like grow a lollipop tree or levitate.

i suppose this is how bushco's fighting back. but come on, ladies, even dead-set chastity-belt-clad conservative ladies--do you want this man to be involved with your lower bits?


he's crazy! he's got the crazy eyes! i'd chase him away from my reproductive system with a flaming torch. the last time the bushmen tried to plant a psycho ("dr." w. david hager) in a role like this, they were shot down. this time, though, it appears to have been carried out in stealth, and i am sore afraid. two more years, though, right?

right?

tuesday impatience blogging

i know i promised you that punch-in-the-face blogging would be a monday feature, but this was burning a hole in my pocket and, well, i just couldn't wait.

glenn beck, my bottomless well, offered me this gleaming treasure during yesterday's show, on which he discussed democratic congressman charlie rangel's desire to reintroduce a military draft:

"It's not like the stalled progress in Iraq has anything to do with the quality or the quantity of those currently in uniform."

unbelievable. i think i'll make my point through contrast; here are some other things that were said on monday. these things were said in the washington post:

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter said Monday that the U.S. needs to push more Iraqi security forces to the front lines. Other Americans, including some military officials, have suggested boosting U.S. troop levels to help train the Iraqis.

President Bush said Monday he wasn't ready to decide between the rival calls for more or fewer U.S. troops on the ground.

Referring to the Iraqi security forces, Hunter told The Associated Press, "We need to saddle those up and deploy them to the fight" in dangerous areas, primarily in Baghdad. Hunter, a California Republican who is interested in his party's 2008 presidential nomination, took a different tack from Sen. John McCain, a front-running 2008 hopeful who has urged that additional U.S. troops be sent.

these things were said on bbc news:

The review panel's study, commissioned by Gen Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has all but rejected a massive scale-up of operations in Iraq, the unnamed officials told the Post. More troops would be required to do this than the US military and fledgling Iraqi security forces could provide, they said.

But the Pentagon group had also concluded that a swift withdrawal of US troops would be likely to push the country into full-blown civil war, the sources said.

The officials said the panel was likely to favour a hybrid plan that cut the number of troops in combat roles while expanding US efforts to train and advise Iraqi security forces, the officials said.

Under the plan, an initial boost of 20,000 - 30,000 soldiers to the 140,000 already on the ground would be followed by longer term cuts, to as few as 60,000 troops, the newspaper reported.

no mention of how much longer that term might be was made, and i think that's a pretty weighty thing to leave out. will we be down to 60,000 troops by the end of next year, or the end of the decade? enquiring minds want to know.

the next piece is an excerpt from an article written by frederick kagan that was published yesterday on the web site of the american enterprise institute for public policy research. it's good, smart work, and i recommend that anyone interested in the topic take a look at it and that glenn beck be locked in a room and forced to listen to an audio rendition of it for the next 72 straight hours.

The Iraqi military, unfortunately, is still a work in progress. Although there are growing numbers of trained Iraqi soldiers formed into increasingly competent tactical units, those units remain highly dependent on American logistical support for food, shelter, ammunition, and transportation. This situation is not entirely the U.S. military’s fault. It stems also from the failure of the Iraqi government to establish ministries capable of performing their assigned tasks--a failure abetted by woefully inadequate assistance from the nonmilitary agencies of the U.S. government.

Wherever the blame for this failure lies, there is no denying that it has occurred. The Iraqi military cannot function without a significant American logistical presence. It cannot continue to improve in quality without a significant American training presence, which includes a partnership between Iraqi combat units and coalition combat units conducting counterinsurgency operations. These facts make nonsense of any idea of significantly reducing the American presence as a way to “incentivize” the Iraqi military. Redeployment on any significant scale will not incentivize the Iraqi military. It will lead to its collapse.

Consider the current deployment. There are now about 150,000 U.S. service members in Iraq, including perhaps 65,000 in sixteen brigade or regimental combat teams (the troops who regularly conduct raids, patrols, cordons and searches, and so on). There are also about 5,000 soldiers permanently engaged in training Iraqi units. Most of the remaining soldiers are primarily engaged in supporting these efforts and the survival of the Iraqi army. They maintain supply depots and supply lines. They transport essential goods around the country and distribute them at forward operating bases (FOBs). They keep both the U.S. and the Iraqi armies alive and moving. They are assisted by numerous civilian contractors and even local Iraqis, but the military personnel provide the glue that holds the entire effort together.

enough? all of these examples underscore the limitations of both the quality and quantity of the troops currently on the ground in iraq. the quality issues are primarily the result of inadequate training of iraqi forces, but we'll never be able to devote enough troops to that training effort if we don't increase the number of military personnel in iraq, because right now there are just enough bodies to keep everyone (or so we hope) in food and water. if we don't send more troops, the best-case scenario would be things staying exactly the way they are; the realistic scenario would be a none-too-slow descent into unmitigable chaos, and you'd think that beck, whose terror and hatred of islamist extremism surpasses all known boundaries, would understand that this is the absolute worst thing that could happen right now in this part of the world. beck likes to say that people like rangel are badmouthing the caliber of the u.s. military when they say we need more soldiers, but beck, as we've established, is about as sharp as a marble. our troops are heroes, but they aren't supernatural, and 150,000 of the greatest human beings on the planet will never be able to cover 300,000 positions. so many of these troops, some of them just out of their teens, some of them in their teens, are on their third deployments, and every time they go back the odds of them never coming home increase. even lt. col. robert maginnis, whom beck interviewed on the monday show, had this (extremely restrained) comment to make:

Well, Glenn, we have 520,000 in the Army. At least, that`s what we`re authorized to sustain; 141,000 in Iraq. As General Schoomaker, chief of staff, says, it really does strain the Army, especially given that we`re in 125 nations around the world.

So do we need more troops? Perhaps, if we`re going to sustain the current level of activity. Or, you know, God forgive us, if we continue to increase the number of engagements. Then we`re going to need more people, and you can`t grow them overnight.

now, i'm not in favor of a draft, but the problem boils down to math: we can't accomplish more than we've accomplished with the current number of troops. can't. can not. and it makes me want to throw up all over my own shoes when i think about the game of russian roulette we're playing with the soldiers we've got right now, especially when i remember--and i haven't forgotten yet--that they were sent to iraq for NOTHING. NOT A BLOODY THING, AND DAMN STRAIGHT I'M YELLING ABOUT IT. i'm furious that any of this ever happened, i've never supported the war, i never will support the war--but the sooner we get the iraqi forces trained to the point of self-sufficiency, the sooner we can start thinking about bringing america's role in the war to an end. rangel's argument, which may or may not involve some subtle psychological tactics, is, "I don`t see how anyone can support the war and not support the draft. I think to do so is hypocritical."

beck's response?

"[F]or Charlie Rangel to say it`s hypocritical to support the war and not support the war--bull fricking crap, Charlie Rangel."

bull fricking crap, indeed. the rest of the program, which includes a rant about how hollywood is poisoning our youth by sneaking environmental themes into animated films about wildlife, shall be dealt with another time. i feel better to have spoken up, but i fear i may never again feel good.